As if a turtle you have laid your eggs in a bowl of sand. Unlike the turtle you sit next to your own heap overlong considering the wondrous thing you’ve done, the babies wrestling in the gritty dark. And all the while the land cools steadily, a small white light somewhere over the sea, over
There it is, the wren. Keep still. Breathe in. The tiny bird with stumpy tail has landed near the windowsill and moves from twig to stem as quietly as rain. Feathered and breathing, it matches its portrait on the copper farthings of my childhood sixty years ago but look away and it has gone again
This elfin child was taken into care, And maintenance devolved upon the State. His whimpering mother was inadequate, His father vanished into empty air. Life came unfurnished – nobody was there To dress his wounds and make the pain abate. It was too much to ask and far too late To find another mother anywhere.
The figure in the shadows stared at Eve And shook the beans inside the bag. ‘Believe Me, crops of serpentini beans achieve A growth of two feet, even more, no lie.’ Eve, flattered by him, looked and gave a sigh. He rattled them and said, ‘Give them a try…’ ‘Perhaps I could be tempted…’ Blushing
Figs, lemons, almonds and holidaymakers, the fronds of palms and those fierce plants whose sharp extrusions in place of leaves, so uncompromisingly rigid and pointed, could pierce the heart with a dagger thrust, like the imagined, feared loss of your only child, here in this arid, heated beauty nourished by varieties of liquidity, these green
A place to see the little things between the monuments and tombs. As in the chapel of St Gabriel, a pencil. Here they are, behind the obvious. Next to the chapter house, a cupboard with a bowl, four toilet rolls. How small things quietly wait, make us forgivable. Inside the vestry, just inside the door,
It hangs, a mobile in the stairwell, always in motion however slight. Each silver scale as it sparkles there a neighbourly lodestar guiding us home to where we shall meet for ever in friendship beyond the darkness of your loss. Nothing you made that did not shine, nothing you dreamed can leave us now. And
for Lucy Dallas Because they wanted to go home and some bit part, a rat in deep cover, raised the alarm (he had done harm himself, but legally, and hid his shame) or, falling in slow motion, the cashier, shot through the heart for moving a finger, reached with his last breath for the dead
Like old-time washerwomen floodwater is sousing trees and shrubs out on the drainage. Floating wrack dribbles seaward from their labour. Last time rains poured day and night in this way, the country was refilling after years of drought. This deluge spreads mirror over roads. Human effort gets its pages turned and blanked under microgroove and
I’d tell you I came back here, that I’m writing in this room, if you had not found another and are happy, I presume. I’d tell you I returned and I have walked to you know where, if it were not to disturb you for so little, seems unfair. I’d tell you I have chosen
In the summer fields your life left you. She ran out from under the hood of your heart and tottered across tarmac on clippy-cloppy hoofs like a teenage girl in heels. No time to notice the strange evening light, the sun low down on the green high crops, only time to brake and watch her
I sold the sleek black bike you said I should buy. My special treat, in the shop, on my own, I couldn’t fulfil. It took your love, your woman’s will to tutor me in the art of self-giving and not to fear the gifts that feed. My self-denial father’s handed down creed. Cycling was the
The moon comes knocking on our door; a slavish stalker who hangs around all night. The slowest of walkers, he matched at an equal distance each of our homeward steps. We close our door on him, push him out only to find he’s already skirted the house, taken the side alley, slipped the padlocked gate,
Together, they wrote a book. Its title was Solitude, or Every Man his own Hermit. They wrote alternate chapters in a small room with one chair and a desk hardly bigger than A4. Bip wrote on Saturdays, Mondays and Wednesdays, Bop on the other days. On Sundays, neither wrote. On Sundays, they went together to
You fling yourself out the door into the wind and start to row yourself down the steep hill with your standard issue steel stick, working it along the dark path, clickety-click, clickety-click. It’s a path you would know with your eyes closed, the old Richmond Hill you cycled up and down as a boy, in
The imagined day includes sunshine and shopping And people saying Yes and being on my side. There’ll also be traffic and occasional drizzle So I know I haven’t died.
Out on the crumbling landscape’s farthest edge, Their winter journey starts, and while I know Some names, I can’t recall from stripe of wing Or sobbish cry which honours which. And so This panic by a fading coastal ledge Is all that’s left — an urgent need to bring Old screams back round in one
Calendar pages: one scrumpled day dies in a garden spun to fools’ gold, where wind mews over twigs and bones at an outhouse door, black sky sustains the buoyancy of loss, dried sap knots branch to branch, caging a star whose variable glance is light’s tumult cut to the quick yet cold to the retina
That August, in La France Profonde, the frelons were out in force, honey-gold cruisers of late summer air, their poigniards sheathed. The heat lapped at a sticky terrace table, our observation post for village fictions — Jean, his bench-saw snoring to the hornets, a girl scraping her pans out to the hens, that old man
Come to the garden, that familiar place Where life renews itself against all odds. Untightening buds act out their memory, And dying seems a momentary pause. Our star that took an afternoon to sink Hangs in reluctance from the darkening tree Like an amused and philosophic eye Penning his treatise of the out-of-doors. We are